The present invention relates to a system for enabling Service providers (including NSP—Network Service Providers, ISP—Internet Service Providers, etc. and primarily ASP—Application Service Providers), hereinafter referred to ASP's, to manage Service Level Agreements (hereinafter referred to as SLA's) in a highly efficient way. The purpose of the present invention is to give ASP's a tool to define SLA's with their customers, and to enable them to monitor and execute the actual service level given to a customer according to the SLA. The way this is achieved is through the application of a language based on Service Level Agreement Language of Measurement (hereinafter referred to as SLALOM).
An application service provider (ASP) is a company that uses the Internet to offer individuals or enterprises access to application programs and/or related services, so that these programs and services do not have to be located in personal or enterprise computers. The ASP market is becoming increasingly competitive. In order to survive, ASP's are beginning to offer a wider set of services to complement their offering. Besides the application that the ASP's are providing, they are offering Help Desk, technical support, consulting, training etc.
As this market matures, customers are demanding service level agreements (SLA) as the core component of the engagement, and reports on the actual service level delivered. Different customers will have different service level needs. The ASP's will be facing the problem of providing differentiated services to different customers. Meeting the various service level expectations of its customers and allocating the sufficient amount of resources for each customer becomes increasingly complicated.
The ASP's that will survive this cutthroat competition will be those who:
                Offer tailored services to their customers        Gain customers confidence in their service delivery        Maintain an efficient operation        
The Service Level Agreements (SLA) is a contract between a network service provider, such as an ASP, and a customer that specifies what and how services will be furnished by the network service provider. Common SLA's include the following factors: What percentage of the time services will be available, the number of users that can be served simultaneously, specific performance benchmarks to which actual performance will be periodically compared, the schedule for notification in advance of network changes that may affect users, help desk response time for various classes of problems, dial-in access availability, and usage statistics that will be provided1. The problem, however, is that these factors are difficult to measure and control. A new generation of tools has had to be created to deal with these developments. 1 www.gurunet.com under Service Level Agreement
There are tools today that compute service-levels, but each of those tools defines its own idea of service-level. There are many tools that measure different measurements that are used to compute the service-level. Some of these tools can compute certain aspects of service-level, but they lack the ability to define different types of service-level computation.
There is, however, no known tool in the market today that manages service level agreements (SLA's) for Asp's. There is also no tool that measures service-level, based on definitions in the SLA. Tools that exist today enable raw measurements of resources or equipment that the ASP uses, but none of them allows a language that can describe the way to combine those raw measurements into a valuable description of the service level of a specific customer. Today, service providers that want to compute service-level that was given to a particular customer, must perform those calculations manually, using the raw measurements received from the measurement tools. This leads to very simple definitions of service-level, since more complicated definitions are very hard to compute manually.
Example of two such tools are InfoVista (http://www.infovista.com) and NetCool (http://www.netcool.com). Both these tools, gather information about resources on a network. Netcool focuses mainly on getting failure events from the network, in order to alarm the system administrator, while Infovista's main focus is on a longer term gathering of information, in order to produce reports of an overall performance.
There is thus a widely recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have a tool that allows ASP's to define different ways to automatically compute service-levels, and consequently to measure and control SLA's.
The present invention allows such flexibility and automation. The invention, referred to hereinafter as Oblicore, is a central management tool, based on a specialized Service Level Agreement Language of Measurement (SLALOM) that allows the ASP to manage all aspects of the SLA's signed with its customers and to track the actual service level delivered. Using the present invention's solution, the ASP can provide timely and reliable reports to its customers on the service level delivered, compared with the service level agreed upon in the SLA. Another feature provided by the present invention is the calculation of penalties to be credited to the customer in case the targets have not been met. The ASP that utilizes the present invention is able to optimize allocation of its resources according to customer prioritization and based on the actual service level delivered to each customer.
When the ASP industry becomes mainstream, most software applications will become commodities. For example, a company that wishes to implement a Human Resources application from PeopleSoft will be indifferent to which ASP provides it. The main difference between the offerings of different ASP's will be in their SLA's and their ability to execute their SLA—this is what customers will focus on in choosing their ASP's.
By implementing the present invention, the ASP will have a system that enables it to define its different resources in a single place. The ASP's sales staff will be able to easily tailor an SLA that suits the needs of each customer and charge more for higher level of service, without compromising the ASP's ability to meet the needs of other customers. The ASP may allow the customer to change some of the definitions in the SLA dynamically (for the right price) to accommodate the customer changing needs.
Using the system of the present invention, the ASP manager will be able to identify potential customers that can be offered higher levels of service and additional services.